Miss Sara Sampson

It also contained Miss Sara Sampson, which is the first major bürgerliches Trauerspiel, or domestic tragedy, in German literature. Middle-class writers had long wanted to do away with the traditional class distinctions in literature, whereby heroic and tragic themes were played out by aristocratic figures, while middle-class characters…

…by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Miss Sara Sampson (1755), an attempt to shake off French Neoclassical influence and produce a truly German genre—the bürgerliches Trauerspiel (“middle-class tragedy”). A similar attempt to be rid of the delicacy of Racine came from the Italian dramatist Count Vittorio Alfieri. In plays such as…

With his play Miss Sara Sampson (1755), Lessing also introduced to the German stage a new genre: the bürgerliches Trauerspiel (“bourgeois tragedy”). It demonstrated that tragedy need not be limited to the highborn, as Gottsched had maintained in his interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics. Lessing reinterpreted Aristotle in his…